Mobile robots are being used with increased frequency to accomplish a variety of routine tasks. In some cases, a mobile robot has a heading, or a front end which is ideally positioned towards the location where work should begin. It may be beneficial in some cases for a mobile robot to be able to automatically sense the direction of its heading in relation to parts of an environment, for example, the walls of a room, so that it may maintain a desired heading in relation thereto.
In some cases, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is used to identify the location and orientation of a robot, however this solution requires extra components which are expensive and more processing power and time. A need exists for a more simple way to determine a robot's orientation in an environment that does not unreasonably increase the cost of a robot.